Arden is two! + life lately

So technically Arden is two and some change—her birthday was January 31st. But I've been meaning to drop in and give an update on our best girl for some time now! Tonight seems like a good time. 

Please look at that belly. 

She is so bright and so funny. We literally cannot leave the house without someone stopping us and commenting on her red hair. Which, by the way—we are completely unable to control no matter how hard we try. It's crazy and has a mind of its own. But it's so her and we couldn't love it more.

For her birthday we planned this big, fun party at the house—baby shark themed, a bounce house, a cake and baby shark cookies. We invited the whole family. Then I literally came down with the flu ON her birthday...two days before her party. We had to cancel at the last second. I think I was more sad than anyone. When the weather warms up we'll find a Saturday to call the bounce house people back and have them come drop it off to make up for the missed party. We could only get a raincheck since we had to cancel so late, so why not?! Bring on the moon jump. 

When the whole house got well, we took her to Build-a-Bear where she made a stuffed bunny for her birthday. 

We also TURNED ARDEN'S SEAT AROUND! This was her first ride in her "big girl seat"...she likes it so much better like this and so do we.

Arden loves to grab my phone and take pictures—they're all over my camera roll and I love them. Ps: I swear I'm wearing clothes in this photo.

The last few weekends we've been spending a lot of time putting together her "big girl room" and tonight is her first night to sleep in there! 

^^ Taken right before bed tonight. I've been so nervous that I'm watching her monitor like a hawk...even though she's already been asleep now for well over an hour. And surprisingly enough, she pretty much went right down. So far, so good! Now I'm just hoping she doesn't tumble off the edge. 

Her room isn't done yet, but I'll post more pictures when it's closer to the finish line.

Arden has the biggest personality. She loves to tell anybody and everybody "Hi!" whenever we're out in public. She LOVES cheerios, which she refers to as "daros"and she also appreciates a good bag of donut holes and a chocolate milk now and again. Her favorite activities are playing on the playground by our house, singing songs (Baby Shark, ABCs, + Row, Row, Row Your Boat—to name a few), eating fruit snacks, going to school with her friends (especially her bestie Ava), and "watching" Paw Patrol. She won't actually watch it, but she does love to have it on in the background. 

Arden still loves reading and never misses a chance for story time. These days she's like a little grown up—we hold actual conversations and sometimes I find myself thinking, "Oh my goodness, where did my baby go?!" 

We love you big, AGC!

I'm just about 22 weeks pregnant now and I'm pretty stoked about it. The baby is kicking and rolling just about every day. March 12th (at about 20 weeks) Drew even felt her kick for the first time right before bed!

 I'm feeling a whole lot less sick these days—usually just in the mornings. The heartburn has subsided, but from being preg with Arden, I know it will rear its ugly head again in the third tri. For today, I'm just going to enjoy the calm before the storm and eat all the tomato-based foods I can while I can still get away with it. 

Current cravings: Avocado toast, water (preferably cold), salad with balsamic dressing

Current complaints: I'm SO itchy

Current aversions: The smell of a bathroom, Chick-Fil-A (I know, who am I), and pretty much anything can set me off at the drop of a hat out of nowhere

Two weekends ago Drew and I went to Austin for a Kane Brown concert. I bought him the tickets for Christmas and we decided to make a weekend of it. It was the very first weekend of the year that was sunny and warm and beautiful, and we were so blessed by the time away together—just the two (and a half) of us. 

You know you're preg when you opt for cotton candy at the concert. 

We stayed at this little boutique hotel right on the river in Round Rock. It had been open for all of two weeks, so it came with its own set of issues, but man was the balcony view killer! 

It was called The Ruby in case you're in the area. 

Basically this was one long weekend of eating solid meal after solid meal. We had Mighty Fine, Krispy Kreme, Mattie's, Juiceland, Moonshine, more Krispy Kreme (judge us) and The Monument. 

For our very last Austin stop: Ikea. Naturally. We needed to stock up for Arden's big girl room! 

Things in March have been slower than they were the first two months of the year and the Clarks are very thankful for the lull. We'd pretty much had all the excitement we could take, and we've been in need of some calm and easy. In a few weekends we're going to enter another season of go, go, go and I'm tired just thinking about it. I'm actually 100% serious when I say we won't have an open weekend from April 6th until June 8th. And after that, so help me, I will not add anything else "big" to our calendar until this baby comes—you can bet your bottom dollar. It's gonna be very hot and I'm gonna be very, very pregnant! Haha. 

But for today I'm going to be thankful for this quiet weekend, just us three! And, from there, we'll take it one day at a time.

Baby girl Clark #2 is on her way!

I know, I know...I've been MIA on the blog so far in 2019. Trust me, I've had plenty to chat about, but most of it had to do with us learning that we are EXPECTING A BABY, and until a few weeks back, we still hadn't officially shared the good news.

So now that the secret is out, here we go—the Clarks are expecting little Clark lady #2 at the end of July! And I know you're wanting an update, so buckle in.

We are already 21 weeks and some change into this shindig and let me tell you, I've never been so happy to be feeling halfway normal in my life! The first 20 weeks of this pregnancy were a trip, that is for sure. Now, don't get me wrong—I'm still not 100% on the mend yet. For example, just yesterday morning I'd basically barely opened up my eyes before my head was in the toilet, so it's not all rainbows around here yet. But it HAS been better, and we are just thankful for progress! 

If you want to read the fun story of how we found out we were expecting, click here for all the details. But for the sake of keeping this short(ish) and sweet, I'll skip ahead to when it all sank in.

By week 6 things were still pretty even keeled. Other than a few mild symptoms—I literally couldn't even think about coffee, I was tired more than usual (maybe because of lack of coffee) and I had some other slight aversions—it was fairly smooth sailing. I was actually lacking symptoms more than I'd anticipated and started to wonder if everything was okay. With Arden, I was 10/10 sick almost immediately. Everything just seemed much more dramatic much faster the first time around.

Our first appointment and ultrasound was December 7th where they confirmed little bit was in there, heart was beating strong and he/she was rolling around happy as a clam. 

I keep a note on my phone of my symptoms week by week, and about week 7 was when I started to feel truly terrible all day long without much of a break. That's around the time I called my doc in desperation and learned that the nausea meds that saved me in my first pregnancy were no longer covered by insurance—and were $700 a bottle without it. I cried.

That week I started taking Unisom, a sleep aid my OB recommended for nausea. I was convinced it was garbage until I forgot to take it before bed one night. The next morning I quickly figured out that it is in fact not garbage. And even though I was still sick while taking it, I was definitely sick without it. It's only been a few weeks since I've finally been able to get away with skipping it every night. 

At first I was surprised by how quickly I started to show. Then I realized that from when this photo ^^ was taken (week 8) until the photo below was taken (week 15) I didn't see much bump-growing action at all. Finally at about weeks 19-20 the belly made an appearance (which was around the time the first photo in this blog was taken). And now I can officially say that the "rubber band trick" (if you know, you know) no longer works and if the pants aren't maternity, I'm not wearing them. Period. 

I told two or three really close friends I was expecting pretty early—mostly because I was feeling so sick I literally had to explain why I was not going to be at work. Haha. Turns out I was able to suck it up and get to the office on time just about every day, with the exception of a few.

We waited until Christmas to tell our families we were expecting—I was about 9 weeks along. We wrapped up a "Big Sister" shirt in Arden's size, our ultrasound photos and a little notecard and gave it to each set of parents for Christmas. The card says "Jingle bells, jingle bells, jingle all the way. Oh what fun it is to say a baby is on the way! Baby Clark coming summer 2019."

They were each so surprised and excited. I'm convinced there is nothing more fun than telling your parents you are expecting their grandbaby.

2019 started out ROUGH for the Clarks. For starters, I got the flu...while pregnant...so no good meds were available to me and I was literally bedridden for five full days. Right after me, Drew got the flu. Then literally two days later he also tested positive for strep. Then Arden got the flu (by the way YES, we all three had the flu shot. I will continue to receive it annually, but will remain convinced that it is a scam). In the midst of all that, Arden got a bad stomach bug, and I got this terrible, awful cold that I couldn't shake for at least three full weeks. It has been a MESS of a first few months. So for our anniversary February 7th, I wanted to shake things up and do something fun. Not expensive (hello, baby on the way), not crazy, not cliche...just fun and unexpected.

I'd heard about this at-home gender test you can take, and I thought it would be a fun surprise for Drew, so I ordered it and waited for it to show up.

Basically you poke yourself, fill up a little vile with your blood and mail it off to some lab in California (seemed legit). From there, they test the sample and see if it registers any male DNA. If it does, you're having a boy. If it doesn't, you're having a girl. They email you your results directly, so my friend Hannah received the results to her email address on our behalf and was sweet enough to have the gender color baked into a cake. 

One day Drew came home from work and there was a random white cake on our countertop. (I think I was about 15 or 16 weeks along.) Even with the "It's a..." cake topper on it, he still had no clue what was happening. When I explained that we were about to learn the baby's gender, he literally could NOT believe it. He was honestly very caught off guard and also very excited. 

Before this cake basically fell into his lap, we hadn't really talked much about how we'd learn the gender. We knew we didn't want to do another big gender reveal party—which was SO fun, but we wanted something a bit more intimate this time. I think we both assumed we'd just find out at our anatomy scan in the doctor's office and that would be that. So again, Drew was pretty stunned. 

We were both nervous/anxious for no reason. We knew we'd be happy either way, but I'd had so many dreams it was a boy that I'd started to get a feeling it was. Plus about 70% of the baby names on my list were boy names. But deep down I think I knew...

Baby Clark is a girl! Even though my symptoms onset a few weeks later this time than last time, there have been just about zero other differences between these two pregnancies. I've been sicker than a dog, couldn't even look at coffee or tea until around week 15, I get heartburn at the drop of a hat and I slept for a solid 12 hours a night for the first 12 weeks—all just like with Arden.

So Arden's gonna be a big sister! Does she understand what's happening? Barely. She "knows" there's a baby in mommy's belly—whatever the heck that means to her. She knows she's going to give her crib to the new baby, and she's getting a new big girl bedroom soon. She knows the ultrasound photo on the fridge is "baby belly mommy" and she knows that mommy can't carry her around as much because of the baby. But even though she can recite all that...she's still pretty confused and that's okay. She'll have all the time in the world to figure it out. And she's gonna rock it. 

This kid is a mess, but man do I love her. She really couldn't be cuter or sweeter and she's going to share mommy and daddy like a champ. 

And of course we are ALL already wondering what color hair little sis is going to have! 

At our anatomy ultrasound at 18 weeks everything came back normal and we confirmed that baby Clark is indeed a little lady. Unfortunately my quad screen test came back abnormal and we had to go see a maternal fetal specialist and have a level two ultrasound performed. It was scary. And I'll definitely follow up with that story soon and update you on what we found out. 

Please check out that cute profile and that tiny little hand waving at us with five perfect fingers! 

But for today Drew and I are just ecstatic to have been entrusted with this sweet baby girl. Drew was made to be a girl dad, and he truly can pick out outfits and matching bows with the best of them. I can't wait to see him front row at dance recitals or coaching the soccer team in a few years. He was made for this. 

Do we have a name picked out? YES we think we do. Could it change tomorrow? For sure. So we are keeping it under wraps just like we did with Arden until she arrives. Come on July! We are already over the moon and beyond excited to meet our summertime girl.

I wrote this the day I found out I was pregnant.

I wrote this the day I found out I was pregnant so I wouldn't forget a single detail. It was November 19, 2018—the Monday before Thanksgiving. Just a little warning, there are a lot of details in here you may not care to read, so feel free to skip this one and head over to "Baby girl Clark #2 is on her way!" to get the highlights and skip the gory details. ;) Ok here we go.

At 7:15 this morning, I found out we're expecting baby Clark #2. Wow. What a dream. What a blessing. It's a funny thing, trying to get pregnant. We've been "trying" for some months now. But for a while, it was proving to be harder than our first oopsie girl. And that was both a little surprising and disappointing.

After I had Arden a sweet friend who has been a mom for a very long time warned me, "Start trying to get pregnant earlier than you want to the second time. It took us a while to conceive our second daughter." Although I naively assumed she was wrong about us, it stuck with me. As the months went by and I saw more and more pregnancy announcements on Instagram, I felt this odd mixture of hope that I could be next and fear that I wouldn't be. I started to get this sense that something was off or wrong. I needed to drink more water or take more spin classes or remember my vitamins more consistently. And then, of course, Arden is at the age where people were starting to ask.

When is the next baby coming?!

So I built up a wall and pretended we weren't even trying because that was easier than telling the truth and reporting back with disappointing news every month. I could barely give Drew the news of the arrival of another period without getting sad, much less anyone else. So I even convinced myself that we weren't "really" trying.

Once we REALLY start trying, we're going to get pregnant right away. Right now we're just seeing what happens. 

But then Drew and I were out and about on a Saturday and I couldn't stop running to the bathroom—except I wasn't necessarily drinking more liquids than I normally do. That was my very first pregnancy symptom with Arden, so I was officially suspicious and made Drew take me to CVS to buy a test. The CVS was fairly busy given it was a Baylor football Saturday, so I just snagged the first Clear Blue test box that my eyes landed on, checked out, and beat a path to the door before I ran into someone I knew while carrying a pregnancy test.

When we got home I ripped open the box, snagged a test out of the package and ran to the bathroom without really giving the box a once over. I thought to myself, This ain't my first rodeo. Once I took it out of its wrapper, I realized I didn't get my usual pack of digital tests, like I prefer, but instead I accidentally grabbed a combo pack of one digital test and one analog test. (Digital tests simply flash the words "pregnant" or "not pregnant" rather than you having to decipher the lines on an analog test. Some people prefer analog because their readings aren't so cut and dry—this case being a prime example.)

I took it, waited, and up popped a very clear "negative" sign...except then I noticed another faint vertical line. Wait, was it a plus sign?! The more I looked, the more I saw the phantom plus sign. Drew took a look at it to see what I was making such a fuss about, and it was so faint that he thought it was just the existence of a plus sign that I was seeing. Basically, "You're looking so close that you're seeing the line that would fill in blue if you were pregnant." I'd never taken an analog test before, so I blindly assumed he was probably right. To confirm, I threw back some water and took the second digital test in the pack just to be sure. We were on our way out the door for wine night and dinner with friends, so if I was pregnant I obviously wanted to avoid drinks. The digital test flashed the words "not pregnant" clear as day, so that was that, and we went on our merry way.

Look closely in that first box...you see what I see?! ^

Of course, that weird test reading was all I could think about all night. After wine night I stayed up late reading forums of women who had similar readings as mine. Some turned out to be pregnant, some didn't. The next day was Drew's family Thanksgiving in Dallas, so we spent the day there. On the way home, we stopped at Target and I grabbed four more digital tests. 

I went right home and took one—it read "not pregnant" simple as that. So I went to bed a little sad, but with hope that it was still really early for an at-home test to be able to detect a pregnancy. Plus, my app was telling me I was due to start my period the next day (today), so I knew I could take another test with more accurate results in the morning. (For those new to the pregnancy world, you're supposed to take a test the day you miss your period for more accurate results. Definitely not all these days before your missed period, like I was trying to do.) I prayed that in the morning my test would be positive. That, if it was His will, we would have a little sister or brother for Arden. I also gave myself a pep talk about how I was ready to be pregnant again. I acknowledged that last time was really hard, and if we were blessed with another pregnancy, this time could possibly be hard, too. Maybe even harder. But that was all okay—I knew I was ready for round two.

This morning I walked right into the bathroom, took my test, and let it sit on the counter while I started my hair. It takes about three minutes for the results to come through, and I actually forgot about it momentarily. When I glanced over at it a few minutes later, there it was. 

Drew was still asleep, but if there was one thing I was sure of in that moment—it was time for him to get up. I ran into our room and tossed the test on Drew's pillow. I know, kinda gross, but I was in shock. I flipped on the lamp and said "Read it! It's positive!" Even half asleep, he knew what I was telling him. He smiled big and said "Babe, we're gonna have another baby?!" He's been over the moon ever since. 

I didn't waste any time re-downloading my baby apps and switching my tracker app over to pregnancy mode. Haha.

In what I suspect to be week four of this pregnancy, this little babe is just the size of a poppy seed and, if my calculations are correct, is due at the tail end of July. 

I may be getting ahead of myself entirely given it's so early, but I even ordered Arden a big sister shirt this morning. Christmas is coming and I know we'll want a fun way to tell the families over the holiday. 

I haven't quite called the doctor yet. It still feels a little surreal. I'm waiting for it all to kick in...and if I remember correctly, it won't be much longer until I'm sleeping 14 hours every night and have my head in the nearest toilet for the foreseeable future. The first trimester is no joke.

But I just can't make myself care about those hard things today. I feel...blessed is the word that comes to mind over and over again. I feel favor. I feel overwhelmingly thankful. I can't believe that I accidentally took an analog test that planted a seed of excitement and hope. I can't believe I took two more negative tests after that. And I can't believe the fourth test was actually positive. 

A promise fulfilled. Thank you Lord for this gift. You are a good, good Father. 

Happy Thanksgiving, friends.